Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

I feel pain in my soul, but it’s the pain of life returning.” The poignant shreds of a torn heart, or high-minded sewage? “Trung, you say you want the U.S. But you say you’ll go north.” “First the North. Then the USA. I know a way north.” “The colonel mentioned you worked with primitives.” “Some boys from Ba Den. It’s true. There was a program to enlist the

tribes, or at least indoctrinate them. I don’t know what happened to the

program. There’s so much wasted effort. And pointless death.” “The colonel is interested in such people.” “It’s true, he wants me to accompany a group to the North again.” “Why would you go back north?” “The question is why didn’t I get out a dozen years ago, when I went

to the North and hated it there? In 1954 some people stayed in the South because they knew the party expected nothing in two years, no election, no reunification. The rest of us weren’t so smart. We boarded the ships for the North with our eyes put out by hope, and saw nothing. They took us north to make us forget our homes, our families, our true land. But I only remembered more clearly. I remembered the red earth of Ben Tre, not the yellow earth of the North. I remembered the warm southern days, not the chilly northern nights. I remembered the happiness of my village and not the rivalry and thieving of the kolkhoz. The life of the family, the life of the village, that’s the communal life —not the kolkhoz. You can’t throw people together and forbid them to leave and tell them they’re a commune united by doctrine. I thought Marx would give us back our families and villages. That’s because I only thought of the end Marx talked about: I don’t know the English or the French, but he says that at the end of the future the state is like a vine that will die and fall off. That’s what I expected. Do you know Marx? Do you know the phrase?”

“I know the English.” Together they paged through the dictionaries and Sands devised an equivalent for the expression “the withering away of the state.”

“Yes. The withering away of the state. And when it withers away, it leaves my family and my village. That’s what I saw at the end of the future: the French are gone, the Americans are gone, the Communists are gone, my village returns, my family returns. But they lied.”

“When did you realize they lied?”

“Soon after I came to the North. But it didn’t matter to me then that they lied. The Americans were here. First we must deal with the Americans, then we can deal with the truth. I was wrong. The truth is highest. The truth first. Always the truth. Everything else comes after the truth.”

“I agree. But what truth are you talking about?”

“The Buddha describes four truths: Dukkha, Samudaya, Nirodha, Magga. Life is suffering. Suffering comes from grasping. Grasping can be relinquished. The Eightfold Path leads to this relinquishment.”

“You believe it?”

“Not all of it. I can only tell you my experience. I know from experience that life is suffering, and that suffering comes from clinging to things that won’t stay.”

“Well, those are facts. What we in America would call ‘the facts of life.’ “

“Then what is the truth for you in America?”

“Something beyond the facts. I suppose we’d call the Word of God the truth.” “And what is the word from God to America?” “Let me think.” He laid his hand again on the French-English vol

ume. But he was tired now. Ten minutes’ conversation had dragged them through a hundred dictionary entries and taken nearly two hours. He knew only the Word as imparted by Beatrice Sands, his Lutheran mother: This life, she’d wanted to tell him at moments that transported her, moments that embarrassed him because he viewed her as a woman unworthy of them, a woman trapped by clotheslines in a yard of tall grass by the railroad tracks, this life is but the childhood of our immortality. Mother, now you know if it’s true. And I pray to God you weren’t wrong. And as for America—inalienable rights, government by consent, parchments, mountains, elections, cemeteries, parades … “Well, all of it can be debated,” he said in English. “In any language it can all be argued about. But the facts you name can’t be argued with. But there’s something beyond that.” He tried French: “There is a truth, but it can’t be told. It’s here.”

“Yes, there’s nothing else. This place, this moment now.”

“And now I’m very tired, Mr. Than.”

“I am too, Mr. Skip. Have we done enough today?”

“We’ve done enough.”

He put Trung upstairs, across the small hallway from his own quarters, in the room full of the colonel’s files, among which he hoped the double slept soundly. Skip slept, but not soundly. He woke in the dark and looked at the iridescent dials of his watch: a quarter after two. He’d dreamed of his mother Beatrice. The details evaporated as he tried to remember them, and only his grief stayed, and a certain excitement. He’d been everything to her. That could stop now. No longer a widow’s only child—once on the long train ride to Boston he’d looked out the car as it moved slowly through downtown scenes—Chicago? Buffalo?—to see two boys on the street outside a small grocery, eight-or nine-year-olds, ragged, sooty, smoking cigarettes, and had assumed they must be orphans. Hereafter, that’s who he was.

Then remorse crushed him physically, the blood pounded in his head, he struggled for breath—he hadn’t called, hadn’t written, left her to ride to her death on a gurney all alone in helplessly polite apologetic midwestern confusion and fear. He flung the netting aside, put his feet on the floor, straightened his shoulders, raised his face, and drew air in short gasps. Maybe a drink.

Trung turned in upstairs in the big house in a storeroom filled with boxes, on a bed made of boards stretched between two footlockers and covered with a Japanese straw tatami. The CIA’s representative had given him a butane lamp, and he had a socialist-realism novel in Vietnamese which he didn’t care to finish and a copy of Les Misérables in French. He’d read it so many times it no longer interested him. He lay in the dark feeling the house around him and wondering if he’d ever slept in a dwelling this large, outside of the New Star Temple of his boyhood.

He heard the hallway’s other door open. With the soft tread of bare feet Mr. Skip passed the storeroom and took the stairs down to the rest of the house.

What now? Grief, sleeplessness, Trung believed. Noises from the kitchen—It’s best to leave him alone. His mother is gone.

Mother, I grieve for you still.

He lay in the dark ten minutes and then got up and followed. Downstairs he found the American in shorts and T-shirt, sitting beside a hissing butane lantern in the study with a book, and a glass with ice in it beside the lantern. “Did you get some sleep?”

“Not yet.” “I’m having some Irish whiskey. Can I get you some?” “All right. I’ll try it.” Mr. Skip started to rise, and then said, “We have glasses in the

kitchen,” and settled back in his chair.

When Trung had found a glass and returned, the American was paging through one of his phrase books. He reached to the floor beside his chair and raised his bottle of liquor. Trung held out the glass and he poured a little into it.

“Do I drink it fast or slow?” “How do you drink rice brandy?” “A little slowly,” Trung said, and sipped. Musky and medicinal. “It’s

quite good.” “Please. Sit.” Trung took the chair at the desk, sitting sideways. Mr. Skip said, “I’ve been looking for your name.” He closed his

phrase book. ” ‘Than’ means the color of the sky, and there’s a flower that color